東京！ Tokyo! Part 1

So, after 7 months (Such talk of remaining time here is henceforth 100 percent zettai-ni Verbotten), I finally managed to make it up to Tokyo...

Mental note: DO NOT buy tickets using a computer system you've never used before and has a large possibility of using an entirely new random assortments of squiggles you've never seen before to book a seat on a train which leaves in 4 minutes...

Incidentally, what I did manage to book myself a return Shinkansen (Bullet train) ticket for ￥7000 using above system. I thought this was suspiciously cheap... then the gate attendant pointed out I hadn't paid for the other 3/4 of the ticket...

So, the Shinkansen... pretty cool. Goes fast... (Osaka to Kyoto takes about 10 minutes...), and best of all, I randomly sat next to some salary-man (who used to live in Uruguay) coming back from Fukuoka who, once he caught sight of the manga I may perhaps have been rather overly prominently reading, started talking to me and bought me beer and snacks all the way to Tokyo! He gave me his Meishi (business card)!

Ryota's response when I told him this was "I wanna be a foreigner!" (then he got cutely paranoid that he'd offended me with that... while I'd like to think it's my radiant personality, I think it's probably the "novelty Japanese reading foreigner" effect that got me the beer...)

So... Tokyo is pretty big... Bit bigger that Osaka. Smells different to... And they have funny accents (I say funny accents, to be honest I hear it every-day on TV etc).

Met Louise on the Friday night at Tokyo station (Just to emphasise, that means "the station CALLED "Tokyo Station", as opposed to the 500 others IN Tokyo) and went over to Shinjuku for some dinner (we have better Ramen and MUCH MUCH better Gyoza down here incidentally...) before heading out to Tsukuba to meet Mei and her boyfriend (Naru) who very kindly lent me their floor for 3 days :-). Tsukuba is... a little far from Tokyo... Mei spends 3 hours commuting to Tokyo and home every day... That's pretty much what the words "大変" and "お疲れ様" were invented for...

Soooo, Saturday Mei and Naru and I met up with Louise again to go for a wander around Aoyama/ Omotesando (I wanted to see the the Comme des Garcons and Prada stores. I stress that I DID NOT BUY ANYTHING- I HAVE WITNESSES, and that I actually went for the architecture...). Also met up with one of Mei's friends who went to Kobe University AND had Ogasawara-Sensei as her supervisor too! (And know's Mayuko...).

Headed over to Meiji Jingu and Harajuku next (DEAR GWEN STEFANI: Way to go hype the place up for like, 5 years or so... bit disappointing to be honest. Also, some-what less famously, Harajuku has a truly inordinate number of Crepe bars...). Went to Shibuya after that to see the crossing (3000 people cross it every time the lights change.) I survived crossing it! 3 times!

Oddly, Shibuya has this famous little statue of Hachiko the dog, who has pretty much an identical life story to Edinburgh's Greyfriar's Bobby...

Anyway, off to Gunma-ken (Ie, 2 hours north of Tokyo.) to go to the yakitori (BBQ) stall run by Mei's friend Tomo's friend the Shinjuku-transvestite-bar-owner at a festival in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. Incidentally Tomo's friend's mother and grandmother were also there...

Incidentally, Tomo knew who I was... "Oh, Thomas. Designer's Bitch yes?"

So, after the BBQ we somewhat anti-climactically train-ed it back to Tsukuba for 2 hours. As Mei put it, "Tomo went too far this time. In a geographic sense".

To Be Continued...